Adafruit
Pimoroni Rainbow HAT for Android Things™ and Raspberry Pi
The Rainbow HAT from Pimoroni has a buffet of sensors, inputs, and displays to explore Android Things™. Use it as a weather station, a clock, a timer or stop...
The Rainbow HAT from Pimoroni has a buffet of sensors, inputs, and displays to explore Android Things™. Use it as a weather station, a clock, a timer or stopwatch, a mood light, or endless other things.
Pimoroni collaborated with the Android Things™ team at Google to create this great add-on board that features displays, sensors, sound, and lots of LEDs! It's the perfect introduction to developing Android Things applications on the Raspberry Pi.
Features
- Seven APA102 multicolor LEDs
- Four 14-segment alphanumeric displays (green LEDs)
- HT16K33 display driver chip
- Three capacitive touch buttons
- Atmel QT1070 capacitive touch driver chip
- Blue, green, and red LEDs
- BMP280 temperature and pressure sensor
- Piezo buzzer
- Breakout pins for servo, 12C, SPI, and UART (all 3v3)
The board is designed specifically to show off the wide range of protocols available on the Raspberry Pi, including SPI (the APA102 LEDs), 12C (the BPM280 sensor and 14-segment displays), GPIO (the capacitive touch buttons and LEDs), and PWM (the piezo buzzer).
Visit the official Rainbow HAT driver project on GitHub to get instructions and code snippets for getting started with the Rainbow HAT on Android Things™!
Raspberry Pi not included.
Jargon buster
Plain-language definitions for the technical terms used above.
- breakout
- A breakout is a small circuit board that makes a tiny or hard-to-solder component easier to connect to with standard pins. It matters because this OLED module can be wired into a microcontroller project without needing to solder directly to the display’s fine contacts.
- GPIO
- General-purpose input/output pins are microcontroller pins you can set in software to read signals, switch devices on and off, or connect to peripherals. The number of GPIO pins matters because it limits how many buttons, LEDs, sensors, and other parts you can wire directly to the board.
- PWM
- Pulse Width Modulation is a way for a digital pin to simulate variable output power by switching on and off very quickly. It matters for controlling things like LED brightness, motor speed, or servo-style signals from a microcontroller pin.
- servo
- A servo is a motor with built-in position control, usually told to move to a specific angle by a control signal. It matters when you need repeatable movement, such as steering, arms, flaps, or linkages, rather than continuous spinning.
- SPI
- A fast serial communication bus often used for displays, memory cards, and sensors. It matters because SPI devices need specific pins for clock and data, plus a separate chip-select line for each device.
- UART
- UART is a simple serial connection that sends data over separate transmit and receive wires, often labelled TX and RX. It matters because this module is designed to replace a wired UART cable with a wireless link while keeping the same serial data format.
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Brands
Raspberry Pi
Sensors & Input
